A typical storage device includes a magnetic storage medium that includes magnetically represented information stored thereon. A head is disposed in relation to the storage medium that senses the magnetically represented information and provides an electrical signal representing the information. This electrical signal is ultimately passed to a read channel circuit that performs one or more data detection processes in order to recover the information originally written to the storage medium. The signal derived from the magnetic storage medium is provided to a gain control loop to correct gain errors during a gain acquisition stage based on a preamble pattern on the storage medium. However, the acquisition length of the gain loop is relatively short and this can degrade performance of the read channel due to residual gain errors at the end of the gain acquisition stage.